We are delighted to announce David Wilkinson as the winner of the Robert May Prize 2021, awarded to the best paper by an early career researcher in the 2021 volume of Methods in Ecology and Evolution. In this interview, David shares insights on his winning article ‘Defining and evaluating predictions of joint species distribution models’. Congratulations to all the shortlisted authors, whose articles you can read … Continue reading Robert May Prize 2021: Winner Announced
Post provided by Jolle Jolles Each year Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best paper published in the journal by an author at the start of their career. 10 Early Career Researchers made the shortlist for this year’s prize, including Jolle Jolles, a postdoctoral researcher at CREAF, Barcelona. In this interview, Jolle shares insights on his paper Broad-scale applications … Continue reading Low-cost open electronics like the Raspberry Pi are revolutionizing biological research
Post provided by Dan Parker, Dr Stanislav Roudavski, Therésa Jones & Dr Kylie Soanes The cover of our April issue shows a small model of a 3D-printed artificial hollow created by Parker et al. as part of their article ‘A framework for computer-aided design and manufacturing of habitat structures for cavity-dependent animals‘. In this cover story, the authors explain their method and what it means … Continue reading New hope for urban wildlife
Our April Issue is now online! This issue contains 14 brilliant articles about the latest methods in ecology and evolution, including methods for creating habitat structures for cavity‐dependent animals, quantifying small animal activity, identifying trends in multivariate time series and much more! Read on to find out about this month’s featured articles. Featured Articles The einet package *Open Access* Understanding noise in networks and finding the right … Continue reading April 2022 Issue Out Now!
Post provided by Awoniyi Michael Adedayo Each year Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best paper published in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Ten Early Career Researchers made the shortlist for this year’s prize, including Awoniyi Michael Adedayo, who recently defended his PhD from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) Brazil. In this … Continue reading Rhodamine B – a non-toxic biomarker for assessing the distance travelled by rats in urban slums
Do you spend your days incapacitated by the agony of not knowing how to combine your field-based observational data with your dietary metabarcoding results? Perhaps every time you go to merge them, the horror of conflicting data types and biases causes you to run and hide from the mere thought of analysis. Or maybe the thought of such problems hadn’t even crossed your mind!In this post, Jordan Cuff and co-authors share insight from their recent publication on using dietary metabarcoding in network ecology and how to merge metabarcoding with traditional data types.
The cover of our March issue shows a female Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), with its young kit bringing a crab to shore before eating it. The photographer, Alan Seymour, had been watching the otter from a distance, while laying low behind a large boulder. Direct observations of trophic interactions take a lot of time and skill, especially concerning cryptic species (e.g., semi-aquatic mammals, small invertebrates). Accurately and precisely identifying prey items is mostly impossible by observation. Molecular methods, such as DNA metabarcoding, offer a sensitive approach for investigating trophic interactions of cryptic species; however, this high sensitivity can introduce errors. In this post, the authors discuss potential sources of errors in dietary metabarcoding datasets, and how to use minimum sequence copy thresholds to carefully remove them, detailed in their Methods in Ecology and Evolution article “An assessment of minimum sequence copy thresholds for identifying and reducing the prevalence of artefacts in dietary metabarcoding data”.
Methods Blog 